Robert Wrigley

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Robert Wrigley is a contemporary American poet. His poetry often takes place in and draws meaning from the natural world.

His most recent book is Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Group, 2006). Other collections include Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995); What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

He has published poems in a number of journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker. In 2003 and 2006 he had poems published in Best American Poetry. He is also the recipient of four (not two) Pushcart prizes. Lives of the Animals won the 2005 Poets' Prize.

From 1987 to 1988 he served as writer-in-residence for the state of Idaho, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied with the poet Richard Hugo.

He is currently the Director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Idaho, where his wife, the memoirist and novelist Kim Barnes, also teaches.